One aspect of McEwan’s celebrated status as a stylist is his distinctive contribution to the novella, a genre that arguably reached its pinnacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Novellas like Amsterdam (1998), with its focused critique of the left-leaning elite who did well in the Thatcher era, and On Chesil Beach (2007), with its (apparently) precise anatomy of sexual mores, reveal how McEwan uses the novella as an incisive instrument of cultural analysis. Embracing, as well, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), this chapter considers what it means to be an accomplished contemporary novella writer by making the case that, throughout his career, McEwan has continued to work with great skill in an overlooked literary form, once thought to be the most sophisticated mode of shorter fiction.

Ian Russell McEwan (1948– ) holds a pre-eminent place in late twentieth-century and contemporary British fiction. His standing as one of the most significant British writers since the 1970s is well established, and the interest in his work extends beyond Britain, especially to the United States and Europe, where he is widely read (and studied): his works have received both popular and critical acclaim, and he is, apart from Salman Rushdie (1947– ), perhaps the most truly international author among his peers, the novelists of his generation, born in the 1940s: Martin Amis (1949– ), Julian Barnes (1946– ), Graham Swift (1949– ). The larger underlying claim, which this Companion explores in its different facets, is that McEwan is at the forefront of a group of novelists who reinvigorated the ethical function of the novel, in ways that embody a deep response to the historical pressures of the time. Indeed, from the perspective of literary history, McEwan occupies a central role in a new wave of British novelists whose mature writing began to emerge in the Thatcher era, all of whom found different ways to address the moral problems that presented themselves in Britain from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, a period characterized broadly by the growth of self-interest, the expansion of corporate power and the collapse of the Welfare State.

This chapter is concerned with the non-fictional writing about England undertaken by a series of novelists, prominent in the interwar years, who take their inspiration from rural life. As novelists, Doreen Wallace, H. E. Bates, Adrian Bell, Leo Walmsley and Francis Brett Young all manage to resist generic convention, enlarging our understanding of the persisting relevance of the rural to the literary imagination and to social history. But in their ‘heritage’ writing commissions – extending into the 1940s, with implications beyond the interwar era – they have to confront the social conservatism implicit in the concept of heritage, ‘the condition or state transmitted from ancestors’ (Oxford English Dictionary). One of the more interesting elements of the rural novelists’ heritage pieces is the extent to which they resist the straitjacket of convention and the easy equation between the celebration of the rural and an unchanging verdant England. The heritage works considered here are written (at least partly) against the grain of the stability implied or assumed in generic convention, so that the rural illuminates the social changes ushered in by modernity.

The perception of rural conservatism is rooted in ideas about the reception of literary treatments of the countryside, with commentators writing from the 1980s onwards detecting a fixed idea about English identity; coloured by the equation between place and nationalism, heritage titles have been seen to underscore a static projection of Englishness that is merely implicit in fiction and other forms of nature writing, especially where the attributes of southern England are perceived to have fashioned the national character. Krishan Kumar, for example – effectively summarising the critical view of the 1980s and 1990s – argues that popular appropriations of rural literature from Hardy onwards were part of a process by which ‘the “south country” … imposed itself on the national consciousness, to the point where it was endlessly reproduced as an image of “timeless” England’ (p. 210). In this view, the tendency of the English to wax lyrical about the countryside is a sign of apoliticism, a national characteristic in which social division and political strife are transcended by ‘the idea of a land and people living together softly and naturally’, in the words of Robert Colls (p. 204).